ARTICLES ABOUT RUSSIAN EMPIRE BY DATE - PAGE 2

The leader of Ukraine said Thursday he has invited the leaders of all the Soviet republics, but not President Mikhail Gorbachev, to a summit meeting to discuss their relations. "The Soviet Union as it used to be has ceased to exist," said Leonid Kravchuk in an interview on the morning after he won agreement to Ukraine's independence from the Russian government of Boris Yeltsin. Kravchuk said he will ask the other leaders how to fill the vacuum left by the disappearance of the union.

Over the last two centuries, Russian history has seen several attempts to work toward a genuine democracy. Often the would-be Russian democrats sought direct inspiration from American examples. The 1825 Decembrists hallowed George Washington's memory; later, in the czarist liberal reforms of the 1860s-where the word glasnost became a cherished slogan-many writers pondered the American experience. In 1917, for a little over half a year, an embattled group of Russian democrats tried to establish a truly free democracy.

By Reviewed by W. Bruce Lincoln, a professor at Northern Illinois University and author of seven books on Russian history | November 20, 1988

Catherine the Great: Life and Legend By John T. Alexander Oxford University Press, 418 pages, $24.95 Catherine the Great-the autocrat who established Russian hegemony on the Black Sea, ended Sweden's reign as a major Baltic power, incorporated the eastern half of Poland into the Russian Empire and refused England's request to hire 50,000 battle-hardened Russian troops to suppress the American Revolution-has been remembered too often...

For centuries, European artists relied heavily on the patronage of nobility. Photography's invention and acceptance as an art form came too late for most of its practitioners to enjoy, or perhaps endure, this system of patrician promotion. No baron footed the bill when August Sander set forth to produce a collective portrait of the German people; no marquis eased Jean Atget's burden as he methodically recorded the culture of early 20th Century France. These kinds of monumental photographic projects took decades, if not entire working lifetimes, to complete.

Thirty years ago, Baron Vladimir von Poushenthal had a dream. He dreamed of creating a Russian outpost in this remote Down East village in southern Maine. The baron's vision became a reality during the early 1960s as he successfully lured to the spot 500 of his fellow countrymen, most of whom, like himself, had fled the Soviet state before or immediately after World War II. With its snowy winters, tall spruce trees and nearby river stocked with sturgeon, tiny Richmond seemed like home to this disparate band of emigres.